In the past decade or so, we’ve come to expect 10 or 15 magical minutes from a Rollins concert, a long passage, maybe two, of transcendence—when the saxophone colossus unlocks a new passageway into the…
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A few thousand jazz fans are feeling lightheaded this morning. They saw Sonny Rollins’ 80th-birthday concert at the Beacon Theater in New York City last night, and they’re still marveling (especially those too young to have witnessed giants walking the earth in great number) that, finally, they’ve seen a concert that made them tremble and that people will be talking about years from now.
The two Big Eye IPAs I had enjoyed with dinner were doing the trick. I was feeling weightless even before stepping onto the ferry. Beautiful people crowded the front, holding onto railings and each other, while some sat inside the old, wooden frame. Lower Manhattan was soft, quiet, and blue, and two towers of light shot high into the night sky. Suddenly, imperceptibly, the unreal city became smaller and more distant: I hadn’t noticed that the ferry had departed. We could just as easily have been riding a magic carpet. Robert Baird and I were on our way to see John Prine at…
Stereogum premiered the video for Neil Young’s “Angry World” from his upcoming solo album, Le Noise.
Interesting.
The song begins and ends with looping guitar and voice, creating a nice circular structure; the song is endless, perhaps. The thick, crunchy guitar tone, balanced as it is with fine high end light, is extremely cool and expertly handled by Young, and the video—especially the hot girl parts—is intriguing. But I’m less impressed by Young’s vocal delivery and the lyrical content, which strike me as being a bit weak and lazy. It’s an angry…
Grinderman 2, by Grinderman (don’t click that link), is October 2010’s “Recording of the Month,” and it’s available today. Go out and buy it, before it buys you. Bwhahahahahahahaha.
Awhoooo! (That's the sound of the wolfman.)
When I initially read about the Triple Decker Record on Pitchfork.com, I thought to myself, “Maaaaan, that’s stupid.”
But, then, after I watched the video, and saw Jack White cutting open the 12” with a knife to extract the 7” single from its outer casing, I thought to myself, “Oh, damn, now I have to post another blog entry.”
The Dead Weather’s new single, “Blue Blood Blues,” will be released on September 17th, in three very different versions: a 7” backed with a live version of “Jawbreaker;” a 12” backed with a live version of “No Hassle Night”/“I Just Want to Make…
The October 2010 issue of Stereophile is now on newsstands. On the cover, you’ll see a pretty much life-sized image of Logitech’s Squeezebox Touch, a real dandy of a hi-fi product that costs just $300 and seems to captivate everyone who comes into contact with it. The normally unflappable Kal Rubinson ends his review (page 118) by advising, “Get a Squeezebox Touch right now. You’ll never look back.” Even our cover photographer, Eric Swanson, fell in love with the little thing. He bought his sample. We chose the Mobile Fidelity version of Beck’s Sea Change for the cover art…
Seeing John Prine the other night on Governor’s Island with Stereophile's Stephen Mejias was a fairly profound experience, owing to Prine’s strange, elegiac tone. It may be that he wasn’t down with the venue (a windy island at night) or that he was simply tired (he looked it), but almost everything he sung, even the fun ones like, “Please Don’t Bury Me,” had an odd sadness clinging to it. I tried not to think about how Prine beat cancer back in 1998. The first time I saw him backstage after the cancer had been cut and radiated out of his throat, he cracked a smile and chirped, “Well…
Today, “Elements of Our Enthusiasm” turns five years old, which, in blog years, is older than the universe. I thank you, dear readers, for sticking around and making this blog one of the most visited pages on our entire website. “Elements” is more popular than Justin Bieber.
“Elements” is way more popular than CD Players. “Elements” even gains more views than Budget Components. In fact, by the end of next year, "Elements" hopes to be more popular than Floorstanding Loudspeakers—no small task since Floorstanding Loudspeakers is crazy popular.
Today is also my…
The Ugly American: stalking the streets of Paris’ Latin Quarter, tongue wagging, wrists dragging along the pavement like Quasimodo, desperately searching out record stores in which to spend my rapidly depreciating (Go!) Euros.
Yes, that sad image is a slightly exaggerated portrait of yours truly, trying to hold together a marriage while also getting in as much record shopping during a trip to Paris and Berlin as is humanly possible. After many forays into the wonderous side streets of the French capital, I settled on Crocodisc as my favorite. Two stores side by side, one filled…
Berlin was a much smaller market yet there were some interesting music stores, headed by Mr. Dead & Mrs Free which sells only new vinyl. Nearby was Rock Steady Records (pictured above) which had a decent selection of used vintage vinyl. I hear the flea market by the Brandenburg Gate has a number of vinyl dealers but somehow I never made it there.